


Hurricane Glass

by MermaidMayonnaise



Series: Author's Favorites [2]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Coming of Age, Gen, Growing Up, John appears in the last 1k words, M/M, Rodney McKay-centric, surprisingly mostly gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:13:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22639849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MermaidMayonnaise/pseuds/MermaidMayonnaise
Summary: But in this world where everything must be clear cut and cohesive and real, this minute scrap of trash is no longer garbage, meant to be tossed out on the curb and forgotten—it is everything, and it is everything because it is nothing at all.It cannot be analyzed. It cannot be described or applied to anything in the entire creation of this existence. He thinks it, and therefore it is.That is all.-Or, a fic about growing up and learning to create your own happiness.
Relationships: Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Series: Author's Favorites [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1743976
Comments: 20
Kudos: 30





	Hurricane Glass

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in exactly twenty-three hours. I haven't written anything in months, and I guess everything had been building up and finally burst. 
> 
> Betaed by the fantastic logicgunn, who caught the majority of my typos. Any other mistakes are my own.
> 
> This is my story. This is not a happy one, but not a sad one either, I think. It's a stepping stone for my life onward. 2.9.20

(I wrote this for me, but you can read it too. I’m young and weary and full of something that makes me get out of bed day after day, and I am going to change the universe.)

\- 

When Rodney was eight months old, he was able to identify basic geometric shapes. This in itself was not unusual, but he had a little picture book made of cardboard that unfolded, and on each panel was a geometric shape, and inside each one was another shape. When his mother sat him on her lap and pointed at one of the cardboard panels and asked, “Where’s the circle inside of the square?” and he would point with his clumsy baby hands. “And where’s the triangle inside of the rectangle?” _There it is,_ his fat finger stabbed at the book. _Right here._

His mother knew this was unusual, and made it a point to show the ability to everyone she knew. One of her friends was a pediatric nurse who didn’t believe her when she waxed poetic of his ability.

“She was flabbergasted,” his mother said satisfactorily in her heavy Hebrew accent, leaning back in her chair.

When he was in high school, Rodney asked her if that story was really true, she snapped angrily at him and said, “Of course it’s real. Why do you want to know?” and Rodney didn’t want to answer her that, despite not being able to remember it himself, that simple story had stayed with him and become ingrained as part of his identity. It was sentimental and would ruin his reputation as an emotionless genius, and also so she couldn’t use it against him later.

-

After he moved from Israel when he was a little less than two years old, his parents moved to a city in Canada, then two years after that they moved to a rural area. His parents had both grown up in Israel, both did the required years of military service. His mother had a desk job. His dad fought in combat. He didn’t talk about it, but Rodney had asked him once and his dad said that he’d seen people die. Rodney wasn’t all that great with people, but even he could see that his dad was keeping his face carefully blank.

Rodney’s first memories were of the rural area in which he lived. Well, his actual first memory was of stepping on a bee in a (small, aboveground, child) pool in Israel, but he was one year old and that didn’t count. He wished he remembered the way it would snow, but all he recalled was that there had been a lot of it. They had a swingset in the backyard. 

He remembered breaking his arm. He was in gymnastics, one of those ‘mommy and me’ classes that mothers always took their first child to. They were supposed to be sitting in a circle and not go on any of the equipment without a supervisor, but Rodney crawled away and tried to use the rings. They were two circles that hung suspended from ropes, but Rodney must’ve missed them when he grabbed because he fell forward. The next thing he remembered was crying (no pain, he didn’t remember sensation) and the gymnastics instructor offering him an M&M cookie, and for what must have been the first time in his extremely short life, Rodney refused it. That’s when his mom knew something was wrong, and somebody went to call an ambulance and then he didn’t remember anything after that.

He remembered wearing a purple arm cast, but not which arm and especially not when they sawed the cast off.

-

His second significant memory was before Jeannie was born. He was three and a half. His parents had argued a lot over the name, between Aviv, which was ‘spring’ in Hebrew, and Jeannie, which didn’t particularly mean anything. Rodney and his mom voted for Aviv. His father wanted Jeannie.

His maternal grandmother flew over from Israel to watch over him while his mom and dad were at the hospital. He remembered being in the front of the house, his grandmother (his Savta) on his right. He sat on what they called a window seat but really was a big wooden box with a rectangular green cushion on top, pressed his small hands against the floor to ceiling windows and waited for his little sister to come home.

-

Rodney started preschool. His parents wanted the best education he could have, and that manifested in a Montessori school forty-five minutes away. On his first day, when the kids all lined up at the door, Rodney felt a tap on his shoulder and turned around to see a girl in blond pigtails, who smiled at him with baby teeth and said, “My name is Sarah B, and I hate you.”

Preschool wasn’t all bad. He had a friend called Niya, who apparently worshipped him and followed him everywhere. One day, he decided to color his face with markers. Monkey see monkey do, and suddenly there were two children, one black and one white, walking around with badly drawn cat-whiskers on their faces. They were incredibly happy. Their teachers and parents were not, with the exception of Rodney’s mother, who had always wanted to be an artist and was thrilled to see the artistic side manifest.

-

Rodney didn’t have many early memories of Jeannie. In fact, he didn’t have any memories of her at all. What he did remember, though, was pinching her neck.

Rodney, for the record, was not a psychopath or sociopath. But he _could not_ get over the tender skin of Jeannie’s neck. It was firm and soft and flawless: it turned red when Rodney pinched it hard, and the next day there were blue bruises where he’d touched it. 

He didn’t remember if Jeannie screamed. Maybe she just let it happen, thinking that this was something that happened regularly between siblings, or maybe she was too young for rationalizing and simply idolized Rodney no matter what he did.

Rodney never apologized, because he didn’t even remember it until later, and besides, how could he even approach the subject?

-

It’s always a shock that he was apparently incredibly social in preschool and kindergarten and could make friends left and right. He memorized their home phone number, and would give it to any kid who stayed still long enough to listen to it. He was energetic—no, he was infectious, _bubbly._

He had a friend called Seneca, who was one grade above him but still in the same class. One day, Seneca took him up to the treehouse, whispered, “Don’t tell anyone, okay?” and pulled down his pants and showed off his pretty swanky underwear. Rodney giggled, and promised that if no one asked, he wouldn’t tell. 

Rodney’s backyard was beautiful, a huge clear space bounded by woods. The trees led uphill, and at the very top sat a house with little plastic neon flags waving in the wind, warning to keep off private property. Rodney had made the trek twice. It was long and treacherous and left him out of breath, but he got to see the moths and their cocoons on the trees. The moths were invasive, but the moss that grew on the rocks below them wasn’t, and wasn’t it amazing how moss took years to grow and only a few seconds to rip out? 

A few days or months or years later, he and Seneca were playing prince and princess in Rodney’s backyard. Rodney was the prince, of course, and Seneca was the princess. Seneca made them kiss behind the trees. It was consensual, as much as it could be with kids who were around five years old. Seneca asked, “Can we kiss?” and Rodney must’ve said, “Sure,” not thinking that they were both boys, but rather why Seneca wanted to be a girl in the fantasy. Seneca quickly kissed him behind the trees, and it felt forbidden. His lips were cold.

Seneca, to no one’s surprise except Rodney’s, came out as gay in high school. 

Seneca still lived in rural Canada, and every year his family hosted a party in August. They had a huge property with a creek. Rodney looked forward to it every summer, even though every year he felt his social skills declining and the rift between him and Seneca growing insurmountable. Seneca was going to major in theater design, and had gotten a full scholarship to a college. There had been an official awards ceremony and everything.

It was the summer before junior year. Seneca went to a different school and hung out with a different circle of friends, and every year he brought more and more different people that Rodney couldn’t connect to. This year (it was the last year Seneca’s family would hold their annual party, but Rodney didn’t know it at the time) was different. He was able to muster up the courage and join Seneca's group of theater friends, feeling extremely uncomfortable and intruding as he did.

The party was a two day event, and at night all of the friends slept together in hammocks near the creek, but it was hot and Rodney didn’t have a hammock of his own, and since when did he have to justify his decisions? He didn’t want to sleep over.

The day passed in a flurry of activity, and then suddenly it was night and he and Seneca were the only two people left clustered around the fire pit, which was steadily burning itself out.

Rodney, feeling sated and sticky in the only way that summer heat and s’mores could achieve, sat on the dirt. He slumped against the log that had served as his chair for the past two hours and sighed contentedly. Seneca sat beside him, poking idly at the embers with a stick.

They sat together in silence for a while, listening to the crackling of the fire. Seneca looked at him slightly uncomfortably, and said, “Do you remember when we kissed in the woods behind your house?” (Or maybe Seneca had said “when I kissed you.” It should have been important, but it wasn’t.) 

“I recently remembered,” Rodney said, because he was dizzy with smoke and tiredness and the feeling of being reconnected with his past.

Seneca gave a dry chuckle. “How we’ve changed, huh?”

If this was a fake story, then Rodney would have suavely bent over and kissed Seneca with a sticky mouth and a full heart, and maybe they would have had gay tent sex and Rodney would have finally lost his goddamn virginity.

Instead, he said, “Yeah,” and they both stared into the fire. Rodney sneaked a glance to the side to watch the flames paint colors over Seneca’s features.

Seneca rose to his feet with a sigh. “Goodnight, Meredith,” and Rodney winced, because Seneca had been his first ever friend and Rodney never had the courage to correct him about his preferred name. Seneca headed towards the tents, and Rodney sat by the fire for precisely twenty-three more seconds, and then got up with a crack of his back and headed the opposite direction, going home.

-

In kindergarten, Rodney convinced his mom to paint his room like the ocean, and she finally complied, spending hours splattered in blue and green paint. When the room was completed, Rodney ran his hands over the walls, inspecting every inch of it. The walls were blue and covered in coral and seagrass. Stuffed ocean animals hung from the ceiling, and his mother used the rim of plastic cups to press white bubbles all over the room in clusters, including above the vents. 

Rodney hugged her because it was perfect and everything he’d ever wanted. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine that the grumbling of the heater was a subterranean volcano, heating up the water around him.

After kindergarten, his father’s job required him to move. His parents packed up the house and him and Jeannie and scooted them over to suburbia. 

It was a very sad affair. Before they left, Rodney sat in his stripped room with its beautiful ocean and dripped some salt water of his own from his cheeks onto the wooden floor.

-

He was the new kid for the second time in his life. His elementary school was also a Montessori school. It was an extremely small school, no more than two hundred kids, if that. Maybe a hundred. Everything used to be so much bigger.

The kids had known each other for two years and despite it being first grade, the friendships were already established. Despite that, he found Alex. Alex was Japanese, chubby, and sweet. Rodney established three concrete facts about him: his mom was crazy, there was something wrong with his dad, and he had a little brother called Jay. (Jay turned out to be gay.) They fit together like peanut butter and honey: an unexpected, delicious match, but too much of one would make the other crazy. 

Alex apparently thought Rodney hung the moon and stars, and followed him everywhere. See a trend?

A new boy came as well, Charles, and together they were a triad. Rodney didn’t like Charles very much, but then Rodney’s mother took him aside and explained that sometimes a child’s parents neglected them, and the child took it out on other kids, which didn’t make it right, but Rodney should at least understand why Charles acted the way he did. Rodney nodded, and when he went to Charles’ birthday party and watched his mother and father throw Charles a huge party and fail to show up, thought he understood what his mom was talking about just a little.

-

Intelligence always had a drawback. It was like the universe’s safeguard against someone becoming _too_ powerful.

When you were as smart as Rodney, you always had something _wrong_ with you. You didn’t always have to classify it as ‘wrong’ per se, but there was always something. It could be ADD, ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, antisocial disorder, a greater tendency towards anxiety or depression, whatever. Something that made life harder to deal with.

In Rodney’s case, he had a sensory disorder. It was undiagnosed, but it was almost surely there. He couldn’t wear tags. They would itch at him. He made his mom cut them off. Later, in high school, he started wearing the same five shirts all of the time. The monotony kept him sane. If the colors didn’t change and the fabric didn’t itch, that meant Rodney had one less problem to deal with. Who cared what other people thought? He was a boy. They all wore the same clothes anyway.

He couldn’t bear to have the light on indoors. Rodney’s place of habitation was the sofa in the room they called the library (it housed floor to ceiling shelves of books), and the adjacent room was the kitchen. His parents replaced the kitchen light with an LED bulb, and it drove Rodney crazy to no end. He asked them to turn it off when they were done so many times that it became a joke within the family to leave the light on, or to purposely go and turn it on, because once the light was on, it was inevitable that Rodney would scream at them and get off the couch and go turn it off, and wasn’t it funny to see him run around and do the same thing over and over again? Funny joke, let’s all laugh at Meredith as he runs on the hamster wheel, running and squealing and going nowhere.

-

Rodney used to keep a diary. He didn’t call it a diary, even though he knew very well that it was. He started writing in it. He was embarrassed and felt guilty every time he made an entry late at night, because it felt like there was always something else he was supposed to be doing. Something more important, like sleeping or math or… something. He reasoned that if he had enough time to write down his thoughts, he had time to study more for his test tomorrow.

He didn’t do it often, but when he wrote, he did it in large amounts. He used the blue extendable light beside his bed that he bought to shine on his music stand when he practiced. He aimed it carefully at the page, dug a ballpoint pen out of the bag he hung next to his bed (filled with notebooks and writing utensils and a single inexplicable seashell), opened to a fresh page. He always dated the top, and started writing.

It was stupid, it was embarrassing. He wrote, of all things, about his _feelings._ Rodney McKay did not acknowledge that he had feelings. Like the song by Simon and Garfunkel: he was a rock, he was an iiiisland. There were so many better and more intellectual things he could have been writing about, but instead he wrote about banal things, like how his day was or the specific way Jeannie had ruined his life yet again.

He didn’t ever know when he would write in his diary. It wasn’t like he planned out the day or experienced an event that left him telling himself, “Oh, I’m _so_ going to write about that later.” There was a period that he did, actually, but the ratio of the difference between the times where he intentionally sat out to write to the times when he actually ended up scribbling frantically in his diary was so large that, for the most part, he gave up trying to plan for it.

He did get some hint of when he really needed to write: a feeling, of all things. It would strike him out of nowhere. It was an itch, the same one his body used to tell him to go outside, get some exercise. It was of needing release. It would strike him randomly, could be triggered by a situation or something that someone said. His mind would go into overdrive—he could almost hear the engines revving—and his heart rate would speed up, his breathing would shorten, and he'd immediately start composing in his head. It was only a matter of time before he ran to scribble it down somewhere, anywhere.

In middle school, one of Rodney’s friends (not friends, Rodney only had acquaintances. Rodney didn’t even like this person, but they connected him to a circle of people that, despite making fun of him constantly, made him feel a little less alone) told Rodney that his mom told him and Rodney’s mom had told _her_ that Rodney’s mom regularly read Rodney’s diary.

It was a very ‘he said she said’ situation, but that didn’t erase the lightning bolt of complete betrayal that went through Rodney, because there was personal and there was _personal,_ and his mother had crossed the fucking line.

He stopped writing in his diary after that.

-

“Math calms me,” he said to his mother one day. It was the night before a big test, and he was running through the equations, solving them over and over. “It’s relaxing.”

“Okay,” she said, and internally he could hear her thinking, _What a strange child. A weirdo._

The thing is, Rodney didn’t like telling his mother anything. She always took whatever he told her in confidence and used them against him later. He didn’t even remember any examples of it, but he knew that was just something that she _did,_ like the fact that she could cook. Wait, he did:

As he went through school, one of the highlights of his day was getting home and telling everything interesting that had happened that day to his mother. It was like composing his mental diary, except this was quicker and faster and ultimately more cathartic, because writing about something was one thing, but sometimes it was better to relate a story in front of a live audience.

His mother would then use the stories against him. She would collect his moments of weakness and insecurity and later, when they were having one of their frequent arguments, throw them in his face and say, “The evidence is right here, Meredith!”

But the worst part, the _worst fucking part_ was that every single time, he was so damn happy when he came home and started telling her about his day.

But this, the diary incident, was the last straw. 

Maybe, he reflected later, that’s why he equated moments of vulnerability to moments of weakness.

-

Rodney had a secret. His IQ wasn’t actually as high as he professed it to be. He was actually only a borderline genius. 

It bothered him, especially in school when he was trying to figure out who he was and who he wanted to be. When he joined public school in sixth grade, it was painfully obvious that he was infinitely smarter than the rest of his peers. His grades were instantly top-notch. There was no adjustment period from his Montessori education to the public one. Well, educationally. Socially, he was the same. He didn’t mind much.

There was something in his middle school called ‘enrichment.’ It was the smart kids class. Even though Rodney didn’t have friends, the few kids that he’d tentatively started talking to were all there. Rodney wasn’t, and he complained bitterly about it to his mother for months. 

In the middle of sixth grade, his parents sat him aside and told him that they were going to have him take a placement test. Embarrassingly, Rodney didn’t connect the ‘enrichment’ to the ‘gifted program,’ even though that’s what it was. He went down to guidance once or twice a week and took these strange tests, on math and science and (ugh) history, but there was also these weird tests where he had to arrange blocks into shapes he saw on the card (fun) and where the lady told him a random assortment of letters and told him to arrange them in reverse alphabetical order (not as much). If the order of the alphabet was arbitrary, why would arrangement matter?

There was one incident where he started crying in front of the lady. It had been a really rough day. He’d auditioned for playing piano in the school’s musical, but the person in charge had given it to someone else. It was frustrating because when he’d auditioned, it seemed like they’d like him. But when the list came out, he wasn’t on there. So when the lady showed him a card with a box and asked him to calculate something with it and he couldn’t, he started crying. Full, heaving sobs. The lady patted his back and offered him tissues, and offered a brief respite from his testing, and said that they could resume when he was feeling better.

Thank god for small mercies.

The rest of the tests passed without incident, and one day his parents told him that they were going to be transferring him to enrichment, and would he like to be in third or fourth period? Rodney said fourth period, or course, his one friend was there, but there was a schedule conflict and he was shoved into third, with people he barely knew.

The day he entered class, the people in his class blinked up at him in the same vaguely disinterested way that all new students received, and then the teacher took him aside and said that there was going to be a test tomorrow and today was a review day, and would he like to take the test tomorrow with the rest of the students? It wouldn’t count towards his grade.

Rodney said sure, because it wasn’t like he had anything better to do anyway, and he sat through the forty-five minute review session, took the test the next day despite not knowing anything about the Mongols, and got an 83. He laughed long and hard about it, especially when the person next to him got a score in the 70s.

He didn’t laugh quite so hard when his mother showed him his IQ score. “Why’s it so low?” he asked, and she looked at him strangely and said in Hebrew, “You know IQ isn’t really an accurate measure of intelligence, right?” And then she explained to him that he was still a borderline genius, and that was still an incredible thing, and intelligence on its own didn’t really matter anyway, it was what you _did_ with it, and Rodney nodded numbly.

The thing is, he always knew he was smart. It was part of his identity. The problem was that it had started to define him. His IQ results were a douse of cold water. 

He remembered walking through the hallway with his almost-friend, Andrew Cheng. They were talking about IQ. Andrew told Rodney his IQ score (four points higher than Rodney’s) and then asked Rodney to share his. Rodney declined, and said that he didn’t know his, which was a lie.

At that point in his middle school career, Andrew had accomplished much more than Rodney. Everyone thought that Andrew was smarter than Rodney. Oh, those four goddamn points. They showed that IQ didn’t really matter. If Andrew had basically the same IQ as Rodney, that meant that Rodney was just as capable as Andrew, as anyone. And Rodney knew that he was more capable than anything Andrew could ever do. Fuck the IQ test. Intelligence wasn’t quantifiable.

That night, Rodney went home and wrote in his diary, _Just watch me._ _I am going to change the universe._

-

See, Rodney was _(is)_ very insecure. It wasn’t really a secret to anyone who knew him, except no one _really_ knew him. Rodney made sure of it.

What stung a little was that no one ever particularly tried.

-

Rodney didn’t write much, anymore. But one day he did, and when he was finished, he ripped out the pages and buried them in the trash. This is what he wrote:

All my life, I feel like I’ve been destined for something. I don’t know what. Just something. When you write an essay, you’re always supposed to have some deeper meaning. A hidden purpose. When you conclude, you’re supposed to wrap up the essay and revel in this conclusion, an epiphany.

When watching a television show or a book, you start simple. Characters, plot. Some simple motivations. Moderate worldbuilding. It’s only once the audience gets used to the entire thing that things get interesting.

The best way I can put it is that the world expands. In middle school, they showed us a video in science class that was supposed to help visualize powers of ten. There was a couple sitting on a blanket. 100 square meters. It zoomed out to the grass around them. 101. The world was 107 or 108. The solar system. The Milky Way galaxy. The universe.

Every time your world broadens, your perception of the universe changes. It got me thinking. I’ve been seeing a lot of social justice stuff in school, in the world. God knows we need it desperately, but I always walk past them. I try to justify myself: I’m too young, I can’t vote, I have no money, I’m not in a position of power. I can’t do anything.

The truth is, if I really wanted to, I really think I could do something. Make a difference. Change the world for the better.

But I don’t have the energy. I work so hard and I study so much. At the end of the day, I just want to put on my headphones and block out the world and read my book in silence. 

But what if that’s what they want us to do? What if there isn’t a they? Maybe humanity is naturally corrupt. Maybe if you’re in a position of power, you’ll do anything to acquire more wealth. Maybe it’s your upbringing. Maybe it’s genetic.

Are we good people? Is there such a thing as a good person? Isn’t morality simply our opinion? In one of the islands off of Australia, they still have cannibalism. The rest of us frown on it. They don’t. Who’s to say they’re wrong?

If you do a good thing for a bad reason, is it null and void? Vice versa? If you burn down an orphanage by not completely stubbing out a cigarette on the sidewalk, are you a murderer?

If we die, where do we go? If we get judged, who’s to say the judge is qualified for the judging? Does the soul exist? Why are we sure that there’s a life after this one when all logic points otherwise? Do we have evidence? What is the government hiding from us? Are we bad? 

If I write down genius thoughts on a computer, will I still be hailed as a revolutionary if no one ever reads them but me? If I record mediocre thoughts, will anyone care when I lay on my deathbed? Will anyone really care if I cease to exist?

If I live my life for others but no one lives my life for me, did I ever really live?

-

His whole life felt like it was passing by without him. He used to have a turtle that he kept in a tank, and while it spent most of its time at the bottom sleeping, occasionally it would swim to the surface, stick its nose out of the water, sleepily blink its eyes, and sink back onto its rocks.

Rodney felt like that a lot of the time: like he was in the room, but he wasn’t _there._ He was on autopilot. His brain still worked. He still did his homework and listened in class and yelled at Jeannie and got angry at his mother. But a lot of it felt tedious. Even his anger felt repetitive. He didn’t even want to argue anymore. It was just a thing he was supposed to do, his established role in the family.

He surfaced at random times. He could be on the bus to school or during math class or in the cafeteria, and he’d suddenly blink awake. A better description was The Game: the game where every time you thought of it, you lost. Every time Rodney became aware again, he felt like he lost something. Time, maybe. 

He thought of mortality sometimes, but not as often as he would’ve thought. His life was an hourglass, and his life was sand trickling to the bottom. Every time he would come awake, more and more sand was gone. There was always quite a bit left, but it was inevitable.

It didn’t really bother him, for the most part. Every day felt too long and too short at once, too long for the things he needed to do and too short to do the things he wanted.

-

He had passions, of course. He practiced his piano every night and went once a week to his teacher. She never said anything, but it was obvious that he was very good. He might’ve been a prodigy. One week, she took him aside and told him that while he was an extremely competent technical player, he didn’t have the soul for it.

Which was a fucking lie. He had a soul, and a big one too. It was full to bursting. And also, he was a kid. How could he have soul in something that he was just beginning to learn? His brain wasn’t even developed yet. He hadn’t even hit puberty! There was so much for him to do, so much for him to become. How could he express himself through music if he didn’t even know who he was yet?

He went home in tears and told this to his mother, and to her credit, his mother’s face got extremely red before she picked up the phone, calmly said, “Get out of the room, Meredith,” dialed the teacher, and proceeded to curse her out so thoroughly that Rodney, who was pressed against the closed door listening, had his mouth open a little.

This continued for some minutes, and then the phone slammed back into its cradle and Rodney heard his mother’s angry steps approaching the door, so he stepped back and picked up a book, pretending that yes, he’d taken up reading next to the doors. 

The door opened and his mother said, “You’re not fooling anyone,” and then suddenly they were both laughing hysterically, and when she opened her arms, he went and hugged her tightly.

“If I ever hear you repeating any of the words you just heard, I will make you eat soap,” she told him, and then smiled and shook her head slightly and said, “What a fucking whack job, huh?” and Rodney had to assume the facial expression that kids wore when their parents cursed while talking to them, the _I don’t know that word and have never heard it used in context in my entire life._

Then she let go of him, and said seriously, “Do you want to continue piano?” and Rodney suddenly was so grateful. It was as if the sun had come out of the clouds and showed him the answer to something he’d been missing all of his life and he croaked out, “Yes,” and “Please,” and “Thank you,” and for once he was glad that she was his mother.

-

It’s not that Rodney was depressed in middle school, except maybe that he was. He listened to some emo music, but he also listened to alternative rock and occasionally Rodgers and Hammerstein. But he never wanted to cut himself, never hung out with the kids who pierced their noses and dyed their hair and mouthed off to the teachers in class.

Rodney never wanted to explicitly die. But in eighth grade, he entertained the notion of a Big Red Button. This BRB would make him cease to exist. See, dying always sounded unnecessarily painful. And, despite his mother’s claims of him being selfish, he really didn’t want to cause his family pain. He knew that if he killed himself, his family would be known as That Family, the family whose son decided to off himself in middle school. Oh, that poor kid. Something was always a little off in his head.

He thought about painless ways to die and discarded all of them. The only option was to push through the worst of it and go under, over, and through. It was his only option. There were so many things that he was going to do. Killing himself wasn’t an option: it was an answer to the question _what if,_ but it was the wrong one.

He idolized that BRB. It would make everything cease to exist, just for a little while. He could sit in the silent nothingness, and the world would continue to whizz around him. Then when he felt like living again, he would rejoin the world.

One day, he thought, he might build it.

-

Rodney didn’t like being touched. Hated it. He also didn’t like holding cockroaches, citrus (he wasn’t actually deathly allergic, but it did make his mouth feel funny), rodents of unusual size, and dodgeball.

Every time there was a loud noise or someone moved too fast, he flinched. He hated aerial sports and activities where things came towards him at an extremely high velocity.

When he was really small, somewhere between the ages of eight and ten, he hit Jeannie when they were playing outside in the backyard. He didn’t remember why, and he probably didn’t hit her very hard. What he did remember was his father screaming at him and chasing him around the yard with a rake, threatening to beat him.

His father would also yell at Rodney, short staccato loud yells, and would lift his fist up and threaten to box some sense into him. Rodney would flinch away, close his eyes. His father never did beat him, but when Rodney did something really bad or wrong or said something particularly nasty, his father would throw things at him: clothes, pillows, books. One time he smacked Rodney with a hardcover and left him with a nasty bruise on his lower back.

Rodney knew his paternal grandfather would beat Rodney’s father and his siblings, but that didn’t justify his actions. Rodney wasn’t big or strong enough to fight back, and he hated when the tears came just as much as his father screamed at him about it.

Loud noises scared Rodney immensely, as well as people getting in his face. The second didn’t happen often. The first did. Eventually, he stopped startling at people touching him from behind and loud crashes, but this was mainly because he was in concert band and it was get accustomed to the percussion or fall off of his piano chair.

It took him a very long time to connect his jumpiness to that rake in the backyard.

He wasn’t close with his father. 

-

Rodney had a dream where he had a girlfriend. The girlfriend was angry at him because he didn’t get her anything for Valentine’s Day.

She said to him, “Why don’t you like hearts and flowers? Why do you say that you’re an emotionless hulk?”

If it had been real life, Rodney would have sputtered out: “I’m not. I have feeling down in this shriveled husk of a heart!”

But in dreams he said what he wouldn’t in reality, so instead he replied: “I’m afraid of exposing who I really am because I’m afraid of rejection. If people don’t like the fake me, then that’s okay, but what will I do if no one likes the real me? It’s who I am, my essence. What will I do? So sometimes it’s better not to try at all.”

He woke up with a wet face, a damp pillow, and a niggling feeling that something important had transgressed but didn't remember what.

-

He was a math and physics prodigy. That much was obvious. He could describe his love for STEM, but that was boring and cliche, just like describing a significant other as _someone you understand like no other,_ as _someone you could imagine spending the rest of your life with._

It just… made sense to him, in a way that people and friends and relationships and the world didn’t. 

Science, in a way, was like art, like music. It’s how the world worked and the universe functioned. Learning about quantum physics, to him, was the same as scrutinizing a sheet of music to find the melody and its variations. Because once you learned how it worked, you could utilize the techniques. 

And, one day, you could use what you learned to create something of your own; something that might one day make the world a better place. And maybe that’s what science was.

It wasn’t beautiful, but he thought he could fall in love with it if he tried.

-

He found a group of friends. They found each other through Quiz Bowl, and his mother encouraged him to invite them to his house, so he did. They bonded together, started sitting together at lunch, inviting each other to their houses. Sometimes Rodney was left out and forgotten, but that was okay, right?

He had a friend called Mack, who stopped being friends with him because Rodney was arrogant and made Mack feel stupid. 

“I’m not going to suppress my intelligence just because it makes people feel bad,” Rodney said to his mother.

“But you don’t have to force it in everyone’s faces, and you don’t have to explicitly tell them about your accomplishments,” she said, to which Rodney responded with, “But they’re my friends, aren’t they supposed to be happy for me?” and then after a moment of thought, added, “I don’t brag.”

“Sure,” she drawled, “of course you don’t. Never,” and Rodney grit his teeth.

-

In the dreamscape, he lives in a haze.

He isn’t not aware of anything anymore. The colors and sights and sounds blur by him, whizzing past like burned autumnal leaves. He sees them disappearing in the distance, spots of colors against the dead gray sky.

There’s nothing in this minuscule infinite world of his. He’s in a void. The darkness—except it exists in both velvet and light, for brightness is only the absence of night—stretches past him, and as his eyes attempt to follow its path, it flickers away and disappears, a guttering candle; rage, rage against the dying of the light. But eventually the light fades away.

This used to be a world once, a very long time ago. But now it has faded, reality’s sharp edges muted, and uncertainty is the only tangible thing here.

His eyes begin to water, and that brings him back to the real world, the world that is real and he is real, isn’t he? Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.

The whiteness of the pages of his dreamscape are unending. They stare up at him, a non-sentient being that taunts him, begs to be defined, to be created. For he is the creator. He is the void, he is the mind that creates worlds, the eyes that envision, the hand that populates. Before him, everything is uncertain. Infinite potential, endless supply of power. The feeling is intoxicating.

Carefully, with a shaking hand, he grasps the pen and strokes it gently against the page. Gibberish. But black lines begin to stretch across the page, staining the stark white as they appear. The marks don’t make sense; they aren’t cohesive; they don’t form any sort of pictograph or detail an account of trivial nonsense.

But it _is_ meaningless nonsense, it is true chaos. Not everything takes shape and has form. In this world, where everything must be clear cut and cohesive and _real,_ this minute scrap of trash is no longer garbage, meant to be tossed out on the curb and forgotten—it is _everything_ , and it is everything because it is nothing at all.

It cannot be analyzed. It cannot be described, or applied to anything in the entire creation of this existence. He thinks it, and therefore it is.

That is all.

-

In eighth grade, he had a few sleepovers. His friends introduced him to porn. It was really weird porn, but Rodney didn’t know it at the time, just thought that it was something that made his pants feel tight and made him feel hot all over.

The porn creeped him out, so he didn’t watch it. He was fine with jacking it on his own. He didn’t really see the appeal of whips, and sucking someone else off in the bathroom was highly unsanitary.

Eventually and despite all odds, middle school ended. Rodney discovered that he’d been allergic to the mold within the walls, because the instant he stopped spending time in that place, his perpetual congestion cleared up completely, totally, and utterly.

He didn’t remember anything about his freshman year of high school. If he cared, it would’ve concerned him. During sophomore year, his friends from middle school added some people to their group, and Rodney didn’t like them so he disconnected entirely. For two years he drifted alone, having cut away the rope that held him to the shuttle and thrown himself out into the void of space.

The world was so big, and he was so small. There were so many worlds in an infinite universe, which was ironic because the universe is finite. But still, the massiveness of space… All we are is dust in the wind, a brief twinkling of a far-away star before it’s snuffed out in the sky.

He coasted academically. APs were for junior year. Math didn’t seem as exciting and open and endless as it had in middle school, so he didn’t join the math team or Science Olympiad or any of the other bullshit clubs.

At home, it was the same old, same old: his dad yelled at the people from his work, Jeannie yelled at him, his mother yelled at everyone, and he shut himself in his room and closed his eyes tight.

-

He had one friend that was a girl, Hannah. They took AP Chem together junior year. She was a genius, had taken all of the AP classes, funny and social and he was a lot in awe and a little in love.

Junior year was hell, to put it succinctly. Rodney might’ve been a genius, but being a genius just meant that he picked and processed things faster. The AP Chem teacher didn’t teach at all, and you couldn’t process what you couldn’t learn, right?

He sloughed his way through the homework, studied his ass off, and then got Bs on the test. Bs. ON THE TEST. The tests weren’t even related to the curriculum. The homework problems practiced one thing, and then the tests tested on completely different topics. The questions were old, outdated, confusing, and occasionally completely wrong.

He got two Cs. Hannah received straight As the entire year. Hannah took physics her junior year, back when Rodney was a sophomore. She’d loved it. Rodney cursed himself twenty times over every day for not following her example. He’d wanted to get chemistry out of the way.

Hannah understood chemistry in a way that Rodney didn’t. Everything made sense to her. He’d heard of her before they’d met, and knew that she was extremely intelligent. (But IQ wasn’t everything, goddamn it—) But now he had to work for it, and work for it extremely hard, and he’d thought he understood being incompetent before then, that was _nothing_ compared to the way that class made him feel.

-

Rodney wasn’t a pessimist. He was simply a devout believer in the ineffable stupidity of everyone except a select few.

-

Jeannie was in middle school, and going through mood swings. His parents yelled at Jeannie, each other, and him more than ever. (But mostly at him.) He started visualizing his quiet place, which manifested in lying on his side on the beach. The waves crashed in front of him but would leave his blanket dry, and when he closed his eyes, he could almost hear their _shush, shush_ around him. The air would take on a slightly salty tang, and it would smell like tears.

When he opened his eyes, he would find his mother gone to scream at someone else, and discreetly wipe the tears away.

-

Canada experienced hurricanes relatively frequently, but this year they experienced a doozy. The public school shut down for three days. The storm covered everything in a thick layer of snow, and then glazed it with ice. 

When it was over, Rodney carefully put on his coat and gloves and took a walk outside around the neighborhood. The sidewalks were slippery, so instead he walked on the snow, which didn’t crack underneath his weight. He breathed in the cold air and felt it burning in his lungs, but it wasn’t a painful burn that wounded, it was more like an antiseptic: cleaning, purifying.

The trees were covered in ice and some of them had fallen onto the roads. Icicles hung from cars and houses. The hurricane had scattered water that froze everywhere and everything glittered in the new sun: hurricane glass. Deathly sharp, deathly quiet in the eye of the storm.

But Rodney couldn’t get over _how_ deathly quiet it was. It was nothing like the ocean with its tumbling, constant motion. Here was only the quiet stillness of the post-snowstorm. Snow didn’t really have a smell, except it did, and it smelled like death. It wasn’t a gory death: it didn’t smell like rotten carcasses or carnage or blood, but somehow it was just as unsettling, knowing with certainty that if he buried himself under the snow and went to sleep, no one would ever find him and he’d never wake up.

-

The spring before senior year the day before his birthday, this is what Rodney wrote:

Everything’s changing.

Everything’s changing, and I’ve never liked change. Which is weird, because I’ve been talking about how much I’ve been wanting to escape to college as soon as I found out what college was. To me, it seemed like a glowing haven, a paradise. There would be intellectuals there, people who didn’t care about sports or status or who played with who at outdoor recess.

I know all this was naive, of course. I know it now, I knew it then. It was comforting, though, to have a goal, a vision for the future. It helped me carry on.

Now I’m watching all these shows and reading these books about things ending, and it hits me a lot harder now. When I finish, tears immediately spring to my eyes, and I hug the book to my chest wishing for more. My cheeks are wet and I can only hear my breath gasping in my ears. There’s nobody around to hear, but I still take care to muffle my sobs, lest the neighbors see the weird kid next door sobbing over a trashy paperback.

I’m so scared, and the fact that I’ve come to this realization now makes it hit even harder. I want things to be good at college, tolerable—at least better than my life here. I despise my naiveté, and there’s a fire flickering in my chest, burning, and it’s saying, _More, more._ I need things to be better. I’ve been looking forward to this for so long.

I turn seventeen tomorrow. Seventeen on the seventeenth. Even though I’ve never been much for birthdays, I’m excited. This is it. Seventeen is a good prime number. The best. The sum of seven plus one divided by two is four. Four’s the number. My number.

I’m excited, even though I have school tomorrow and I have to get up early and see the people that I barely tolerate, the teachers I dislike, the school I despise.

It’ll all be better in college, I tell myself. I’ll be cool then. And if not cool, maybe I’ll be getting by, or doing well. I hope so. I really hope so.

And even though I know my life is just beginning, it feels like an era is ending, that some doors are closing that I simply can’t walk through again. Junior year is almost over, for example. I hated it from start to finish, but I think I will miss some aspects of it. I did some math. I finished a few experiments. I even made some friends. One or two. They’re seniors, so they’re gone now, but it was fun while it lasted. I even miss them sometimes.

I say I hate my life, and that’s partially true. Certain people and situations make it miserable, and I spent most of the winter telling myself that death wouldn’t solve all of my problems, that I just needed to get through this winter until it was over. 

It worked, too. The sun always comes out. I returned to my rightful place upon the hammock in my backyard, curled up with a book. The trees give shade and the breeze provides a sweet relief as it rustles over the leaves and cools my toes.

It’s almost eight o’clock and the sun is setting. My fingers are beginning to numb from the cold, my shoulders are sore, but still I keep writing, because what better time to get my thoughts down before everything changes?

I want everything to change. I want everything to stay the same. I know what I want. 

I don’t know what I want.

I don’t even know what college to go to. I have a tentative major, but it seems like I have to give up some of my morals and instantly be in crushing debt. I want a school not too far away, but not too close, either. Not too small and not too big. I’ve turned into Goldilocks with my indecisiveness.

Vacilar. That’s the word for “to sway” in Spanish. A better translation might be to be uncertain. 

Everything’s changing.

Everything’s changing, and I don’t know what to do.

-

Senior year finally rolled around. His prospects for college were amazing. Too bad he couldn’t afford any of them.

He applied to a wide range of colleges, because the truth was he didn’t really know what he wanted. He knew his major would be physics, preferably astrophysics, but he was also eyeing mechanical engineering closely and didn’t want to choose. 

Most of his colleges required supplemental essays. He wrote them well enough, he supposed, but he cobbled a lot of them together last minute and they weren’t as great as they should have been. Later, he thought that maybe he was trying to self-sabotage himself, give him a safety guard: that way if they rejected him, he could tell himself, _If I REALLY tried on those essays, they might’ve accepted me._

He applied to MIT as a joke. It wasn’t funny, but he told himself that it was. He’d get accepted and then he wouldn’t be able to afford it. Hilarious. A big laugh and round of applause for Rodney McKay. He chose Early Action, which was an early notification but a nonbinding agreement.

The day came for admission results to be released through the mail. Rodney didn’t even know the date. He deliberately didn’t want to get his hopes up. One by one, he watched the best and the brightest in his grade get deferred, get rejected. Most of those people weren’t smarter than him (some were probably smarter, though, with their goddamn IQ scores), but they were a lot more accomplished. They’d done those stupid science fairs throughout high school, and placed first place and received money. They’d participated in math teams and chemistry clubs. 

What did Rodney have? His music and his grades. Even his test scores weren’t at all time high.

When Rodney took the PSATs sophomore and junior year, he didn’t study either time and got the same exact grade. He took the SATs because everyone told him to do it, and got the same score. It was embarrassing, since the SATs were scored out of a greater amount of points, and he didn’t tell anyone. 

He took the ACTs instead and didn't study. (If he didn’t study then he could have an excuse if he did badly.) He scored a 35 out of 36 on both sections of English and Writing, which was humiliating. His math score was okay. (He was so far ahead in math that he didn’t remember how to do some of the basics. Sue him). His lowest score was in science. A 22. Rodney felt bile in his throat and ran for the bathroom.

His mother yelled at him about money wasted. He hung his head.

He took the ACTs again after studying, and this time scored an almost perfect score in science. He didn’t care about his math score. His grades said otherwise, and he’d never liked trick questions anyway. His composite ACT score was a little above a 30, but his superscore was much better. Good thing MIT superscored.

The year before, he watched some of the most qualified seniors he’d ever had the misfortune to encounter get rejected. Hannah got denied from every single Ivy except UPenn, so she’d had no option but to go there, paying 70k a year. Her parents were loaded, so it was no problem, but Hannah? If there was one person who deserved what she wanted, it was her.

There was no justice in the world, Rodney thought, and then he received a package in the mail from MIT. It was big and thick and Rodney fumbled it frantically before tearing it open and seeing the red lettered CONGRATULATIONS on the front cover. Okay, great, thank you MIT, and then he saw another piece of paper that said _Congratulations, Rodney McKay, we are proud to present to you—_ and Rodney skipped ahead until he saw the words _scholarship for full tuition_ and then he blinked hard and burst into tears.

-

It was winter break of senior year, and Hannah invited him back to her too big house that contained too few people. Rodney accepted. They ate food in her kitchen. Hannah liked to cook, and she’d make soup for him. The soup was terrible and they both knew it, but he choked it down because he respected her too much to complain.

This is what could have happened:

They shot the shit until Rodney started looking nervously at the clock, knowing his curfew was coming up. Hannah looked at him, and it felt like a goodbye, and he wanted to tell her that he loved her, but instead what came out was: “I used to be jealous of you.”

“I have OCD,” she told him, and she didn’t look surprised at his confession. Instead, she looked a little sad. “I tried to kill myself in tenth grade.”

“Shit,” Rodney said, but she continued.

“I have little to no friends, and the ones that I do are the friends I used to have and they hate me now. My big sister goes to Carnegie Mellon for computer engineering, my little sister is a physics prodigy and she’s already taken AP Physics and gotten higher grades than me.

“My OCD leads me to have obsessive thoughts. I used to think about death a lot more than I should have. I compulsively wash my hands. You think my life is perfect, and it’s not. 

“I’m at college. I take too many difficult classes and I can’t keep up. I have acquaintances but no actual friends. I’m lonely and my room is a disaster and some days I can’t even make myself get up to clean it. I majored in physics but I decided to double major in art, but it’s too much. I want to switch my major to business. I don’t know what I want, Rodney, I don’t know.”

This is what actually happened:

“I have to go,” Rodney said, gathering his things.

“Bye,” said Hannah, and walked him to the door. He never saw her again.

-

So senior year was going great. One by one, his other colleges sent him acceptances (every one of them said yes, and every one of them offered him scholarships, but fuck them, he was going to MIT) and his mother shamelessly bragged to everyone she knew and Jeannie didn’t turn off the kitchen light and somehow the world kept turning.

He submitted his last application, and then it was midterms season. There was always one week before when all of the teachers hurriedly finished their units and had chapter tests, and somehow he got through it. He had three days of rest, and then he studied for midterms like he was going to die. All day, every day. He thought about killing himself. He didn’t.

He got As on all of his midterms (physics, BC calculus, lang, history) and a flat 80 on Spanish. Fuck foreign languages. He was already fluent in Hebrew because of his parents. He didn’t need another one, the teacher was incompetent and the test was stupid and—

And that was the end of that, or so he thought. The next week, he had three tests on Friday. The next day, he slept for ten hours, was conscious for another four, then passed out again.

-

His mother was yelling at him again, the usual—you’re so selfish, an egotistical bastard, you’re a failure of a child, you’re everything wrong with our family, you’re the worst possible manifestation of our parenting—but the clock towards freedom was finally ticking down. 

Seven more months, he thought. Seven more godawful months until I’m finally free. In his dreams he could feel the sea breeze beneath his wings, but when he opened his eyes, the ocean was frozen and glittering far below.

-

When he graduated, he looked numbly around him at the hats flying through the air and thought, _It’s time to wake up._

-

College was supposed to be the best time of his life. All of the movies said so, and while Rodney never believed them, a small part of him always believed that college was where his life would finally begin. It wasn’t to say that college was a bad experience, because it wasn’t by any means. But it was too similar to high school, with the cliques and the one required semester of physical education. (If there was one thing Rodney loathed, it was public exercise.)

The education was excellent. The people were all smarter than him. The food was bland.

He failed his first test, in physics of all things. Goddamn physics. This prompted him to sit down in his dorm room (his roommate went to parties and was never there, but Rodney was used to being alone) and scribbled down something that would change him. He wrote:

I’ve always known I was smart. Even in my private Montessori school, I was one of the smartest in my class. I would conceptualize the material quickly, be able to do the math problems fast, finish the report well before the deadline. But even in that school where I spent three years with the same twenty-three people, I was one of the best. Not _the_ best.

I’m never the best. And I _know_ that it’s a first world problem of the highest degree. But it’s like an itch under my skin. You spend six hours creating a project that you’re proud of? There’s a person in your class that did it better in less time. You got an A for the test you studied your ass off for? Yeah, someone naturally got that A+.

I’m never #1. Do you know how frustrating it is, to be smart enough to know how good you are yet not smart enough to be the best? And every goddamn time, you come home and bang on the walls and throw your story across the room because more people liked someone else’s. I’m not someone that needs validation from other people. But sometimes self-gratification isn’t enough. And when I finally get the courage to publicly try my best, I get shot down.

No one remembers second place. Not coming in first means you’re the worst of the best. And if I can’t even be the best in my small suburban school and now at fucking MIT, how the hell will I manage real life and the real world? There are geniuses, actual geniuses. I’m one of them—tangentially. I don’t deserve it.

Sometimes I hate knowing my IQ. Because even though I know it’s not an actual representation of my intelligence, it’s a reasonable estimation of how I compare to other people. And even my IQ is the average high intelligence. I’m very smart, but that’s it. Not extremely. I’m exceptional, but not by much. Out of every two hundred people, there is someone else who is just as or smarter than I am.

I’m never the best of the best. I’m the middle of the pack. I run and grunt and strain and never catch up to the varsity athletes. And what makes it so much goddamn worse is that I go out in the real world, where everyone is average, and I see how far I am above them that it makes me want to tear my hair out in anger. Because even then, even _then_ I don’t get the highest test scores. There’s always one or two people who get higher. One or two. They’re always there lurking in the background. They’re there.

I’m tired of being the third person, the third in every single fucking aspect of my life. I want to be someone else’s first choice for once. I’ve never been chosen first. Second and third, sure. But there’s never been a time when someone looked at me and thought, _I want him._

And it hurts so goddamn much that I’ll never be picked first. It hurts that someone else will always receive the gold medal. Silver and bronze are useful in their own ways, but in the end, who cares about who was the runner-up for the Nobel? I brush it off and smile, but inside I seethe.

Even if my work is the best there is, I’ll do or say something (because I never know what to do or say or how to act) that lowers someone’s perception of me. Then their opinion of my work is automatically lowered. We try to separate the science and the scientist, but we really can’t.

I can’t even say I’m used to being the best, because I’ve never been the first to cross the finish line. I’m not a revolutionary. I’m not the one that people remember. I’m the student that teachers generally enjoy having in their class: I’m quiet and I do good work.

But if I can’t even do good work anymore, then what am I? Who am I?

I wish I knew. I wish I was the best. I want to be the best. I will be the best.

I’m always reaching for something better, the next step. My muscles are always aching right up to the point just before it becomes unbearable. I push myself until my eyes droop and I can’t breathe correctly anymore. I have to make it. I owe it to myself. I owe it to all of the hours I put in when I was young. I owe it to the dreams I used to have. 

I have something to prove and nothing to lose. I’m willing to type until my fingers bleed if that’s what it takes. I’ll do what it takes. I have to keep pushing myself until the edge. I have to do it. I owe it to myself. I want to be happy. I don’t know what happiness is. I’m afraid that while I’m searching for happiness, I’ll push myself too far. I’m afraid that I’ll never amount to anything. (Not by other people’s standards—by _my_ standards.)

Because what if I’m in second place my entire life? I can’t do that. I can’t take a backseat to my happiness. I have to be happy. I have to work for it. I’m not going to wait for it, I have to seize the fucking reins to my goddamn destiny, now now now _now now NOW._

I will not be the worst of the best.

(Which, when looking back, really explained why he acted the way he did.)

-

He had to take a gen ed chemistry class, which was sad but also a necessity. In the class, which was stupidly easy compared to the AP version, the professor would call on random students. He’d generally make his way methodically around the room, but he’d always call on Rodney. He never skipped Rodney.

One time, the professor called on him and asked him why some elements were more electronegative than others, and Rodney started explaining, “Well, the atom wants—”

The professor interrupted him and said, “The atom doesn’t _want_ anything. It’s an atom. It does what it does because that’s how it is. Now, try again,” and Rodney fumbled through the rest of his explanation.

No one cared what he wanted, only what he did. It was a revelation.

-

He only ever cried in front of one person. She was his best friend in his sophomore year of college, and her initials were DK. She was incredibly intelligent, an unfortunate bio major, and she understood him like no one ever before.

He didn’t even remember what had made him so upset. He just remembered breaking down in front of her, and she sat him down on the couch in her dorm room and stroked his hair and whispered things like, “It’s okay,” and “I got you,” and it was the greatest betrayal of his life when she stopped talking to him a month later and never acknowledged his presence again.

He had sex his junior year of college. He didn’t even remember it, only what happened before: he went to a party, got wasted, somehow picked up someone, and then nothing. He woke in his room the day after with a used condom in his trash can, a headache, and the smell of unfamiliar perfume or cologne that was all over his sheets. He didn’t even know their gender.

Senior year, he lived on coffee. He didn’t remember much, except he found himself at graduation again, but this time no one threw hats in the air. Off to graduate school we go, we turn ourselves around and we do it all again and again and again.

The US military approached him halfway through graduate school and offered to fund his education if he’d come work for them after getting his PhD. _You mean my second?_ Rodney wanted to correct them tiredly, but didn’t. Then they pulled out the NDAs and Rodney’s eyes got incredibly wide and he still never really woke up.

-

To his credit, he still thought he was right about Teal’c. It was a fluke that Samantha Carter managed to rescue him in time.

But that Samantha Carter… She made him crazy. She made him absolutely batshit insane. After she had beat him at his own game and got him sent to Siberia, he angrily masturbated to her smug smile for four months. Or maybe it was six. Time flowed differently there.

-

Then it was Antarctica, the frigid asshole of the world. He yelled at his subordinates, drank gallons of coffee, and fought some Czech scientist over fresh fruit. 

Then some idiot came and sat in the _control chair,_ of all things. And worse, it responded. Rodney, all the way across the base, saw lights and alarms come alive that never had responded before, and ran over to the room that housed the chair. He saw some flyboy, and the first thing he noticed about him was his hair, but then he saw that the chair was glowing a brilliant, wonderful blue. Rodney pushed all of the other useless scientists out of the way, grabbed the flyboy’s shoulders, shook him and said, “Think of where we are in the universe,” and the flyboy’s eyes squinched shut and his forehead creased and suddenly the universe sprawled above them both, and he heard the inexplicable thunder of waves in his ears or maybe that was his heart, and Rodney was wide awake for the first time in years.

That was the day his life began. That was the day his life burst into color, and he thought that maybe this was what he was supposed to be doing all along.

-

Trying to understand John Sheppard was like trying to disprove Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (which stated that the position and velocity of a particle both couldn’t be measured exactly at the same time). The more accurately you measured one, the less accurate you could measure the other.

That principle could also be applied to when Sheppard asked Rodney to join his team. Rodney was shocked, and if he’d still been asleep he would have snapped and said, _No, are you insane?_ But instead he blinked once and said, “Yes,” and then, surprising himself, blurted, “I’d love to. Thank you,” because now he had a new velocity, and he wasn’t sure where his momentum would take him anymore.

-

It was one of the first few days at Atlantis. Rodney’s memories of it were blurred, but one of the only clear memories that rose up above the confusion and panic was when Teyla Emmagan came to his laboratory while he was yelling at his minions and simply said, in the quiet way of hers:

“Who taught you to hate yourself?”

Rodney stood stock-still and blinked. A multitude of people flashed through his head: Sarah B and DK and his parents and every peer he’d ever known, except for a select few, but mostly himself, always himself. 

Because he was Meredith Rodney McKay, he said to himself, but because he was Meredith Rodney fucking McKay, he would not cry. But it was hard, especially when Teyla gently but firmly put her hands on his shoulders and lowered him so that his forehead touched hers. His lips trembled and he shut his eyes tightly.

That was the first time he became aware of Teyla.

Life in Atlantis began to settle down into a routine. Rodney never thought that the extraordinary could be considered normal, but eventually he got used to going through the Stargate, getting shot at by the natives, and jumping back through the gate. He got used to eating meals into the mess with Sheppard and Ford and Teyla. He was already used to yelling at the people who worked for him in the labs, but the faces were new. He even liked some of them. Eventually Ford left (an African-American on drugs, if this was fiction, Rodney would’ve slugged the writers, because that was _so_ original) and Ronon joined, and after Rodney stopped jumping whenever Rodney loomed behind him, that became routine too.

One night after a mandatory day off, the team gathered together and got drunk. John and Teyla eventually went off to sleep, leaving Ronon and Rodney alone on the pier staring out into the ocean.

Rodney was a maudlin drunk. Ronon didn’t say anything, ever, and Rodney felt like he had to say what had been on his mind for a while, so he did. He said:

“I’m worried I won’t ever be happy. I got what I wanted, and I’m wondering what’s next. Will it always be an upward climb, looking for the next mountain?

“I’ve finally gotten everything I wanted: a new life, friends. But my head keeps telling me they’re doing it for pity, that they don’t really want to be with me. I always say the wrong thing and they always look away, snicker. I’m so scared that I’ve picked the wrong friend group once again. I’ve already made the same mistake at least twice, maybe three times. I don’t remember. I need this group to be the one. I need people who I can trust. I need people who love me.”

He was talking like Ronon wasn’t there, like no one was there, because Ronon had closed his eyes and it was easier to speak to the wide open ocean, which reflected the lights of Atlantis like shards of glass. “I don’t love them. Is that a problem? They all have their flaws. I like them, and I enjoy being with them, but I don’t love them. I don’t look at their faces and get filled with an overwhelming affection. Is that normal? Is it normal to want it?

“I thought that I wasn’t lonely anymore; I think that I still am. Now instead of being on the outside looking in, I’m on the inside looking around and thinking, _What have I done?_

“What have I done? I don’t deserve to be in the group. They’re not better than me, and I was the one of the ones who created the goddamn group, and I don’t think I belong. I don’t know why. I think it looks like I belong. But I feel different. Everyone’s looking at me and listening to me all of the time like I’m a leader. I’m not a leader. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve never done this before, I’ve never _had_ the opportunity to do this before. I’m lost. This is new territory.

“I don’t want to mess this up, the new thing I’ve got going on. It feels like I am, though: self-sabotage. Doesn’t feel great, does it? I don’t know why I do this to myself. Why can’t I be happy with what I have? What am I missing? Why aren’t I happy?”

His only response was the crashing on the waves, and he was grateful that Ronon really had fallen asleep.

Then Ronon opened his mouth and croaked, “You need to understand that I’m not responsible for your happiness,” and Rodney’s heart fell and he said, “Yes, of course, I never said that you were supposed to be,” but Ronon stretched like a cat and opened his eyes and said, “I’m not good at this, but please let me talk.”

“Okay,” Rodney said.

“You have to know…” Ronon said. “You have to know that, despite their earlier misgivings, the team loves you. But just because—” he paused “—just because you finally have a home doesn’t suddenly mean that everything is okay.” He stood up, suddenly animated, and paced back and forth. “Life is a fucking struggle, and you have to work to be happy every single day. Even the shitty ones. Even the ones where you figure it’d be easier to end it all. But you can’t. There are people depending on you, and there are people who love you. Being happy isn’t about constantly _being_ happy, Rodney.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Rodney said, feeling like he was in that stupid AP chemistry class again.

“Just—” Ronon said. “You have to try, okay?” and then he wrapped Rodney into a hug, and for the first time Rodney could remember, he didn’t try to tense and pull away.

-

Rodney always hated when stories ended unresolved. If he’d read this far, shouldn’t he get a reward of some sort?

Maybe when one reads unhappy endings, it makes them realize a truth: that not everyone lives happily ever after. Not all stories wrap up neatly and are framed picture-perfect on their bookshelf of happy memories.

And it makes him so _angry_ , makes his stomach twist up and fists clench, because everyone deserves happiness. 

But maybe it’s the lack of resolution that motivates him. It’s what drives him to his lab and makes him start typing furiously, because if no one will fix the wrongs, then _he will._ He will rewrite the equation so the data smooths itself out; he will fix the wrongs to make it right, he will write it so everything turns out okay. 

And he’s not emotional, ever. He’s not good at conflict resolution. But it tears his soul to think of the people that he’d spent so much time with getting an unhappy ending. Because they Deserve Better. Or does he deserve better? Are they one and the same? 

He thinks of their (he’s not sure who ‘they’ are: the Atlantians, the Athosians, Pegasus Galaxy, himself) unhappiness, their misery like a festering wound. His heart aches for them and their troubles, because even though they’re far away on different planets and _even though_ he knows that they’re only real in his head, _he_ will be the one who makes them that way. If he brings them to reality, if they have some outward impact or significance in his life, that means they exist. And it makes him furious to see that none of them are happy and will never be.

But that’s what kicks him into action. Because everything will be okay—it will be okay, because he said so. This is the one area of his life he can control, and he does. Therefore, this is what will happen. They will be _happy._ And then he can continue living his life, and one day maybe he’ll be happy too.

-

That night he had a dream where he was on a stage similar to the one where he presented his doctoral thesis, except instead of a whiteboard and a projector and a computer, it was just him on the wide empty expanse of the stage. 

The lights shone hot and bright on his face, his shoulders, and he could feel his underarms slick with sweat. He wiped his forehead and looked out towards the audience. The full house was completely silent. 

It was crammed with people from his life, insignificant ones that passed by him on the street and in the grocery store; he saw those from the beginning of his life like Seneca and Andrew and Charles. His family was there too: Jeannie and his father and his mother with her piercing eyes. His piano teacher. There were his teachers from middle school. Hannah. His college professors, his thesis advisors. DK. His coworkers from Russia and Antarctica were there too, as well as the people from the SGC.

Everyone who told him yes and no. That he was talented, the best, a prodigy. Every asshole who told Rodney that he couldn’t do it. The cheers and sneers. Top to bottom. Inside out and back again. He took a few steps forward and the only sound was the squeak of his dress shoes on the wood. Break him down and build him up. 

Complete, oppressive silence. What will you do, Rodney? What will you do?

He opened his mouth. He started talking.

“Fuck you,” he said, and it rung out into the audience like a gunshot. 

“Fuck you—I’ve worked hard at becoming a better person. Now people—my team—follow me, listen to me, respect me.” He took a breath. “Fuck you. For the first time. I finally have nothing to prove and everything to lose. People like me now.  _ I  _ like me now. 

“Don’t try to tell me differently. I’ve spent so many years telling myself otherwise, and now that period is finally over. I had trouble getting out of bed, and every day the only thing I looked forward to was going back to sleep and dreaming of nothing. Every time I looked in the mirror, I saw an infinite version of myself—past, present, and future, staring and staring and staring, the only change was the amount of light coming through the window. Well, guess what? I’m going to keep getting out of my bed and brush my fucking teeth. I’m going to make it so I have something to live for. Fuck you.

“I’m happy. Can’t you see that, Mom? I made it. I didn’t have a family, so I made one of my own. One that I trust, and trusts me in return. My very own family. I’m a team player who never had the right team. For telling me otherwise? Fuck you.

“I like who I am. Why are you telling me to hate myself? No. That’s bullshit. I  _ like  _ who I am.” He said it louder: “I like who I fucking am. I’m not perfect, but I’m taking steps towards the person I want to be. I’m angry and egotistical and nervous and selfish, but I’m also smart and I’m creative and I am  _ inherently good, _ no matter what anyone says. I’m me, and I’m only going to ever  _ be  _ me, but that’s not an excuse for stagnancy, so I’m going to be the best me that I can fucking be.

“So many years. So many  _ shitty _ years where I was alone and unwanted, and this wasn’t guesswork because most of you went right up to me and told me so. I didn’t find my niche because I was pushed out of them so often that I internalized the fact that I wasn’t wanted, and turned it on others, because no one can reject me if I push others away first. I spent so many years being miserable and  _ alone, _ and it was my fault but also yours for teaching me. We’re both culprits, but this is the first wobbling baby step, and I’m taking it on my own with others to support me. This is the impetus, and this is my final message: I’m finally happy. Fuck you.”

Rodney left the stage, shoes squeaking with every step just like they did during his presentation, years in the past but bitterly stark in memory. This time he didn’t hear laughter, because he didn’t turn back.

-

This is how it could have happened:

On the way home from a mission, Rodney said to John, “You’re so stupid,” on the jumper ride back, because John’s head was on Rodney’s shoulder while Rodney piloted the jumper, because John finally trusted him enough to give him the wheel. 

John snorted fondly. “Yeah, you’re the one to talk.” He was quiet for a second. “That’s why you love me.”

Rodney froze, debating whether to pull away. Then, remembering what Ronon had said on the pier, shrugged and looked out towards the stars.

John took his head off Rodney’s shoulder and said to him, “Can I?”

Rodney said, “Can you what?”

John took Rodney’s face in his hands and kissed him gently.

 _You moron,_ Rodney thought, and felt something tentatively blooming in his chest, and kissed John back.

“Maybe someday I’ll be happy,” he said against John’s lips, and maybe somehow John understood, because he said, “We’re here for you.” His eyes were wet and Rodney smelled salt from him, from himself, and from the distant ocean of Atlantis.

“Okay,” Rodney said, smiling wide, because he was awake and the endless eternity of space was whizzing past him, but this time he’d cut the rope and people had caught him. 

There are certain people in life. Everyone has them—those specific human beings that you just wish the best for. It doesn’t matter if they’re your family, your best friend, your idol. You support them wholeheartedly. You want them to succeed, to live the American Dream: be famous and successful and rich. That’s what they deserve, and sometimes the normal ideals are all that you can think of to give them.

Sometimes, when you think about it, you don’t know _what_ you could possibly gift to them. But that warm feeling in your chest wants to hug them tightly, squeeze them and reassure them that everything will work out, everything will be okay.

But, most of all, you want to see them be _happy._ It’s okay if they don’t want your dream for them. It’s alright if they don’t want the fame, the awards, the Nobel. But you just see that _spark_ in them, that spark of what makes them who they are, and you want to share it with everyone. That way, the rest of the world can see it too. 

He’d never had a real home, only places that he’d lived in, but maybe with the people he’d found and those who found him, they could build one together.

“I think I can live with that,” Rodney said.

-

_It's not what I wanted_

_It's not what I planned_

_It's not where I thought I'd be_

_Hurricane glass_

**Author's Note:**

> Writing genuine emotions and fears in a story and throwing it out to the void is difficult, even though it’s the coward’s way of anonymity. Hopefully, someone will read it—and, hopefully, someone will relate. That way we both might not feel so alone.
> 
> The title is taken from Catherine Feeny's [Hurricane Glass](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OlTcb0jyg0&list=PLghdEnDj_da0LSR05CMzQh8gv0ALydANA&index=5) because I listened to her songs while writing this.
> 
> Comments make my day and kudos makes the world go round.


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